Although tiger skin and chicken feet are deeply loved by customers and marinated vegetables practitioners, technically speaking, it is not as simple as frying in oil pan. If you want to make tiger skin and keep it crispy, you still have to work hard.
First of all, the choice of raw materials:
Tiger skin chicken feet must be large and uniform, without black palm and claw skin, and with high yield.
Uniform size, easy to understand. What does big mean? Big here means bigger than the size of chicken feet with pickled peppers. If you want to sort all the chicken feet with pickled cabbage by size, it should be like this: chicken feet with tiger skin > chicken feet with pickled peppers > chicken feet with spiced spices, so the chicken feet with tiger skin should be Thai chicken feet, with a single weight of at least 35g.
When buying chicken feet, we should pay attention to distinguish between good and bad, mainly referring to the following aspects: whether there is scar, whether there is skin, the weight of a single claw, whether there is bloodshot, color and so on.
If you don't know yet, attach the identification process for purchasing chicken feet:
1, look at the color: if the chicken feet are too white, it must have been soaked in hydrogen peroxide. The color of normal frozen chicken feet is natural, and even the chicken itself is a little yellow.
2, look at the flesh and blood: open one, open the place to see the chicken claw joints, normal animal joints are dark brown after cooking, and the meat is also colored. If the joints and meat of chicken feet are pure white, it can be further explained that they were soaked in hydrogen peroxide.
3, look at the skin: if you open the chicken feet, the skin is very thin, even transparent and fragile, it is easy to tear off. This is the phenomenon of soaking with formaldehyde. The skin of normal chicken feet is naturally elastic and will not be torn off so easily.
4. Smell: If the chicken feet before freezing are fresh, they will have normal chicken smell after thawing, while the "zombie chicken feet" will have obvious rancid smell, because their protein, fat and carbohydrates will be decomposed by microorganisms after being frozen in the cold storage for many years or even years.
5. Weighing: If the weight is greater than 35g, it is the high-quality raw material of the tiger skin chicken feet you want to choose.
Next is rough machining.
I don't need to say more about thawing chicken feet, cutting nails, removing black feet and cleaning paw skins. The key point is to mention whether it is necessary to "soak nitrate" when a group of pot-stewed chefs soak chicken feet in the market.
Tell me why this pot-stewed person wants to "soak nitrate". According to people who have talked with them, they say that chicken feet are fatter after being soaked in nitrate, which can play a role in enriching tiger skin. Personally, I think it is impossible because of the appearance of tiger skin.
In fact, it is more related to the frying process than whether it has been soaked in nitrate. This statement is an excuse. In fact, soaking in nitrate can remove tooth decay and whiten skin just like soaking in hydrogen peroxide, so unless you buy hard raw materials, you don't have to soak in nitrate.
You may wish to choose good quality chicken feet through the purchase method just shared.
Marinate first and then fry, or fry and then marinate?
This is definitely a problem that newcomers can't figure out. The reason for the confusion is that at present, 80% of pot-stewed food shops in the market pickle tiger skin and chicken feet before frying them. Here, the real practice is to fry them before pickling.
Then why do so many pot-stewed restaurants fry after marinating? Are their technologies inferior to ours? No, in fact, they also know how to make authentic tiger skin chicken feet, but the reason why they choose to marinate and fry them is not to make tiger skin chicken feet.
However, because spiced chicken feet can't be sold for three or four days, they will face the risk of deterioration, so they are fried in oil pan, which is the so-called tiger skin chicken feet. In fact, there is no tiger skin at all, just fried chicken feet at most.
So if you want to make orthodox tiger skin chicken feet and take this as the main feature, I suggest that you must strictly implement the procedure of frying first and then marinating, so as to make rich tiger skin.
If we decide to fry first and then do it, we will do it, but frying is not simple and controversial.
Some pickled people think that they should be pickled first and then fried; Others think that direct frying is more convenient;
The method of pickling is as follows: after the chicken feet are washed and drained, add cooking wine, onion ginger, pepper, soy sauce, salt and pepper, stir evenly and pickle for about three hours, and then fry the pickled chicken feet in the oil pan until the chicken feet change color.
In fact, salting has always been advocated in making halogen products, but there is actually a problem with salting here, that is, all salting must be blanched. If you don't blanch, the spices such as pepper and salt will not be completely absorbed by the chicken feet, so it is easy to fry during frying, and impurities will attach to the surface of the chicken feet, making the final taste bitter.
Maybe you will say that it is enough to wash it before frying. Even so, there will still be bleeding during the curing process. If you don't blanch it, you can't completely eradicate the blood clot. Is it enough to blanch before frying?
I still don't quite agree with this practice, because the chicken feet after blanching are equivalent to changes in the internal molecular structure, which is no different from "marinating first and then frying"!
Having said that, my idea actually came out, that is, I am a person who advocates direct frying, but even direct frying should be pretreated before frying to facilitate the formation of tiger skins and form beautiful colors.
My method is to soak chicken feet 15 minutes in sugar water, and then fry them. The purpose of this is to color the skin and make it brittle. My syrup water formula is water 100: maltose 1: white vinegar 9. If you want to taste sweet, you can brush honey water again before cooking.
In the normal frying process, the oil temperature needs to be grasped. The best oil temperature of chicken feet is 50% to 60% hot. After cooking, gradually raise the temperature to 80% heat, and then quickly cover it, because the fried chicken feet will explode, but the detail here is to remember to leave a small gap when covering the lid.
Prevent the condensed water on the lid from dripping into the hot oil and causing oil explosion again. If possible, you can also fry chicken feet in a transparent pot, so that you can observe whether the color of chicken feet turns golden at any time, instead of always opening the lid to see if it is ready.
Post-frying treatment is very important, which will directly affect the formation of tiger skin. After the fried chicken feet are drained of oil, they should be soaked in ice water immediately, remember that it is ice water! This is not cold water. After soaking in ice water, chicken feet will not only come out of tiger skin.
There will also be a very crisp feeling. If you really don't have the conditions to make ice water, you can put ice cubes in the water, and then put salt to dissolve the ice, so that the water will easily cool down, and the skin on the chicken feet will blister, forming a beautiful tiger skin.
Secondary coloring in the process of marinating
Fried chicken feet are golden yellow at the moment. If you want to show a stable dark reddish brown, you have to do secondary coloring in the process of marinating. My method is to use red rice water+sugar color.
Today, I shared the formula of red yeast rice water for the first time, which is not only useful for tiger skin chicken feet, but also can be used to make duck neck halogen and red halogen series.
As follows:
1. Wash the pan and ignite. Add 125g lard to melt, then add 125g salad oil to refine, pour out and let it cool.
2. Wash 75g of monascus rice, soak it in 100g water for 15min, and put 1000mg cold water into a pot to boil, then add the soaked monascus rice for 10min, and then filter out the residue, leaving only monascus water.
3. The monascus water at this time is not the monascus water we want to use. Pour all the refined mixed oil and monascus water into the pot, boil it again, and then pour it out for 5 minutes. At this time, monascus water can be used in brine.
Formal soaking
The marinating process of tiger skin chicken feet is actually a process of secondary coloring and secondary seasoning. In the specific marinating process, spiced brine is generally used as the basic flavor. If you want to make a strong pepper flavor, you need to add Fujian pepper king and green pepper when preparing the marinade.
Of course, spices have to be pretreated to stimulate the fragrance to the greatest extent. If you are interested in the pretreatment of spices, you can read my previous article, but it should be noted that green peppers can be pickled directly without pretreatment.
Compared with spiced chicken feet, tiger skin chicken feet are easier to cook, so they should be marinated less and soaked more, and the heat must be small. If fried properly, you can turn off the heat and stew for about 60 minutes, so that the chicken feet will be more attractive and delicious.
In addition, my experience is that the brine concentration of braised tiger skin chicken feet should be as low as possible, and the old brine with too high concentration is easy to get stuck in fried products, which is easy to make the final taste greasy. If you have determined that your brine is too strong, you need to add broth to dilute it, and shorten the stewing time appropriately so as not to be too tired.
However, we should also be careful not to marinate the tiger skin chicken feet with new brine, especially the brine with insufficient concentration, so that the marinated chicken feet are not only not fragrant enough, but also not beautiful in color.